CAN OBAMA UNITE THE PARTY? THE COUNTRY? THE WORLD?

I guess it's big news when you can dig up a few distraught and passionate partisans to yell and scream that if their candidate doesn't win the Democratic nomination, they'll vote for a far right Republican who stands for everything that has driven them to be so passionate about their candidate. But when just one day after a powerful speech by that candidate passionately endorsing the candidate who bested her Democrats are coming together like God's Avenging Army... well that isn't news.

Yet today Rasmussen reports that Obama is already building such an insurrmountable lead over the pathetic shell of John W. McCain that the Republicans will be lucky if they wind up with 40 senators, lose only 40 House seats and win as many non-Confederate electoral votes as they lose. Today the gap is 8%.

"Data from Rasmussen Markets gives Obama a 95.1 % chance of winning."

Obama’s bounce is the result of growing unity among the Democratic Party. Eighty-one percent (81%) of Democrats say they will vote for Obama over McCain. That’s the highest level of party support ever enjoyed by Obama.

...Obama’s bounce can be seen in his favorability ratings as well. Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters now give the Illinois Senator positive reviews. Just 41% have an unfavorable opinion. Those totals include 36% with a Very Favorable opinion and 27% with a Very Unfavorable opinion. Today’s results are the highest ratings yet recorded for Obama.

As for McCain, he is viewed favorably by 52% and unfavorably by 45%. Opinions about the presumptive Republican nominee are less firmly established. Just 16% have a Very Favorable opinion of McCain and 21% have a Very Unfavorable view

And if there are still a handful of Democratic women, perhaps Hillary die-hards, who are as yet unconvinced that Obama is the one, still toying with the idea of venting their passions by voting for a man who has a record stretching back for years and years that has been consistent in his disregard for women's rights, women's health, against families, against children, against fairness and equality, against public educataion, against a healthy environment... well maybe these folks should take a look at how McCain has treated the women in his life. He's been a bully and a pig from his earliest days until now.

Today's Daily Mail tells the story no American newspapers has the stomach for-- the story of McCain and his first wife, Carol, who he left for a trophy wife and heiress who could finance his political career.

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.

She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.

But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

McCain pays he medical costs for life and she says they are on good terms. "My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does." McCain has always agreed that that is an accurate depiction of what happened. "Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field.' They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons."

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: "I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is-- deceit.

"When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.

"Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

"This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol."

One old friend of the McCains said: "Carol always insists she is not bitter, but I think that’s a defence mechanism. She also feels deeply in his debt because in return for her agreement to a divorce, he promised to pay for her medical care for the rest of her life."

...Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel-- even by the standards of modern politics.

"McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory," he said.

"After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history."

Too gross to think about McCain's dismal character? OK, just remember one thing: a John McCain term, despite his panicky denials, would be a third term for George Bush, the least successful president in history. It's no coincidence that he's being called John McBush! The desperate lobbyists who are driving his muddled campaign have even gone so far as to claim that it is Barack Obama who would continue Bush's hideous and destructive policies, policies McCain has completely rubber stamped and policies that Obama has steadfastly opposed. How low is that? Knowing how mistrusted and hated Bush and his policies are, McCain is hysterically denying that he would be the embodiment of another Bush term but even his second closest colleague in the Senate-- after Holy Joe-- South Carolina Republican closet queen Lindsey Graham had to admit today that McCain's economic policies were nothing but more Bush. Watch: